Dark Corners: A Novel

by Ruth Rendell

  ‘No, no.’ Nervous as he was, he had to treat her as if she were simple. That was a word his father had used, and one that pre-dated political correctness. ‘You live with your parents in Jerome Crescent. Now give me my key. You won’t need it again.’

  ‘I live here,’ she said. ‘I must go up now. I’ve things to see to.’

  ‘No, Sybil. I’m very sorry about Dermot, but I shall have a new tenant coming in. That’s why you need to go. That’s why I need the key.’

  ‘I’m the new tenant,’ she said. ‘I told you Dermot said I was to live here.’ Suddenly her voice took on the tone of an ordinary, determined woman who knew exactly what she was doing and saying. ‘I have to hold on to the key. I’m taking over my fiancé’s tenancy.’

  He said nothing. To think that he had believed her naïve, an ignorant fool. He went into the bathroom and threw up. Because he had eaten nothing all day, he vomited only yellow liquid.

  He was still in the bathroom when Nicola came home. He had reached a stage where he had to remind himself that she didn’t know he had killed Dermot. Sometimes, when he thought about it, he seemed to remember telling her, and her forgiving him or overlooking it or something.

  She doesn’t know. Hold on to that, he told himself. But I can tell her about Sybil, what Sybil said. I must ask her what to do. ‘Sybil is here,’ he said. ‘She says she’s the new tenant. She won’t give me the key.’

  ‘She must. Tell her you’ll get the police to put her out.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘Then I will.’

  ‘No.’ The idea of the police coming meant only one thing to him: Dermot’s murder. They would be in the house and they would know what had happened to the previous tenant. They would become suspicious. ‘No, Nic. We can’t do that. Would it be too bad to have her as the new tenant? I mean, she’d be steady and quiet and regular in her habits – I know I sound like an old-time landlady – and she wouldn’t make trouble.’

  ‘I’m not hearing this,’ Nicola said.

  ‘Yes, you are, you are. I’m saying let’s have Sybil as the new tenant. It would make things easy. There’d be money coming in. She’d be on her own. She wouldn’t bring men home.’

  ‘What’s happened to you, Carl? You’re young. You don’t talk and think like that.’ In a scathing tone she said, ‘She wouldn’t bring men home. She wouldn’t make trouble, she’d be quiet and steady.’ She didn’t wait for his defence. ‘What’s got into you? You have to turn her out, and do it now. She can go back to her parents. I don’t want her here. We’ll find someone else.’

  He spoke to her in a tone he had never thought possible. ‘This is my house. I decide about tenants, not you.’

  She didn’t argue. Her face went white. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Let her stay. I just hope you won’t regret it.’

  She had said ‘you’, not ‘we’. Whatever happens now, Carl thought, this is the beginning of the end for us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  MOST OF THE pet-owners at the clinic accepted Lizzie without question. One of the few exceptions was Yvonne Weatherspoon, who had known her when she’d been a friend of Stacey. Yvonne hadn’t much liked Lizzie then, and she didn’t seem to like her now.

  ‘Where’s Dermot?’ she asked.

  Lizzie didn’t know what to say. Surely Yvonne knew? It had been all over the papers and even on the London regional news. ‘Didn’t you see it on TV?’

  ‘What do you mean, on TV?’

  ‘Well, he was murdered. It was on TV and in all the papers. They still haven’t got anyone for it.’

  ‘I saw about that Dermot,’ said Yvonne, ‘but I didn’t connect it with our Dermot. My God, what a dreadful thing. I’m really shocked.’ She pointed to the occupant of the cat box. ‘Sophie knows. You can tell, can’t you? It’s been a shock to her as well, poor angel.’ She mouthed kisses to the cat through the bars of the carrier. ‘A nasty animal from down the hill has scratched her and I think it’s got infected. I do hope Caroline can see her. I think she’s got a temperature.’

  Caroline could see her this time and would keep her in to operate on the abscess. Perhaps Mrs Weatherspoon would like to leave her here and come back for her at four? ‘Like’ was not the word, but Yvonne had to agree.

  They closed the clinic for an hour at lunchtime and Lizzie went across the street to the Sutherland Café for a sandwich and a Diet Coke. She still found it hard to sit quietly on her own. Her mind played nasty tricks, returning to the horrific days she so much wanted to forget.

  When she’d first got home, she had thought about phoning Swithin Campbell and confronting him with her suspicions that he’d been in cahoots with Scotty and Redhead. But what would happen if he turned out to be dangerous? It might be better to leave things as they were, with Scotty and Redhead as far away from her as possible.

  If only she had someone clever to advise her.

  Back at the pet clinic, nothing much happened until four o’clock. In the operating theatre, a small room in the back, Caroline lanced Sophie’s abscess and laid her comfortably in her cat carrier to sleep until Yvonne Weatherspoon came for her. But at five past four it was Yvonne’s son who called at the clinic.

  ‘Hi, Gervaise,’ said Lizzie. She was surprised and pleased to see him. He must have cancelled his trip to Cambodia or wherever it was. Or perhaps he just hadn’t left yet.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t little Lizzie,’ said Gervaise Weatherspoon. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I work here.’

  ‘Do you really? My mother didn’t say.’ Caroline came out with the cat, still asleep in her carrier. ‘Can I pay with a credit card?’

  ‘Sure you can. That’ll be a hundred and eighty pounds.’

  ‘I’ll have to get that back from my mum,’ he said, and looked at Lizzie again. ‘Lizzie, I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Do you? Whatever for?’

  He slipped his card into the machine. ‘Last time I saw you, I said you could stay in Stacey’s flat while I was away. But then my sister wanted to live there, and you must have had to move out.’

  ‘I did,’ said Lizzie. ‘But that’s all in the past now.’ What he’d said had given her an idea. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure you can.’

  ‘I need some advice.’

  Gervaise looked interested, as Lizzie had thought he might. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Shall we meet in the café opposite after you finish here? Let me get this animal home first.’

  Next morning Carl watched Sybil in the garden before she went to work, pulling up the few weeds she had allowed to take root there, cutting off the dead heads from flowers he didn’t know the names of.

  She probably worked as someone’s cleaner, he thought. That was what she looked like. Perhaps she would clean for him. Maybe she could do decorating as well as gardening. It began to appear as if he had done rather well in not getting rid of her.

  He must get her a rent book, something he had never done for Dermot. It would be more businesslike. He’d draw up another contract and have Nicola witness it. He had hoped to raise the rent this time, but now he realised he could hardly do that. Sybil wouldn’t earn that much; maybe ten pounds an hour was what he had heard cleaners’ wages amounted to. No, keep the rent to what Dermot had paid – or hadn’t paid in recent months.

  He sat down at the laptop and contrived a sort of contract for Sybil Soames to pay Carl Martin one thousand, two hundred pounds per calendar month – a good touch that, calendar month – for a one-bedroom apartment at 11 Falcon Mews, London W9. He’d arrange the signing down here in his living room. When Nicola came home from work, she usually went straight upstairs to their bedroom to change into jeans and a T-shirt, and it was after that that he and Sybil would sign the document.

  He asked himself why he was treating the process with such weight and formality. Dermot’s contract had never been handled like this. His mother had told him he could now get much more than twelve hundred a month, but he had
said no, and she had supposed he was being generous, that asking more would be greedy. No one could know – no one would ever know – that he shuddered whenever he thought of profiting from the death of a man he had murdered.

  Sybil came back at five. Her shoes made a flapping sound as she walked upstairs. A bit less than an hour later Nicola arrived, carrying a basket of strawberries, a carton of cream and a bunch of pink and purple flowers she said were zinnias. Carl showed her the contract.

  She nodded. ‘You’re still going through with this, then?’

  ‘You agreed it was a good idea.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Carl. As you said, it wasn’t for me to agree or disagree. It’s your house.’

  ‘Well, will you witness Sybil and me signing this contract?’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  She went up to their bedroom to change. The beginning of the end for them, he had thought their argument was. But it had passed and perhaps the end wouldn’t happen. He hoped not. He picked up the phone and called Dermot’s number. He couldn’t yet think of it as Sybil’s.

  ‘Can’t you come up here?’ she said.

  ‘I suppose so. If you like.’

  Passing his bedroom door on the way, he called out to Nicola that he would want her up in Sybil’s flat in a few minutes and would shout for her. It was a hot day, and a thick, humid warmth had risen to the landing. Sweat broke out on his face, on his upper lip, as he climbed the stairs. He had a strong, quite unreasonable feeling of impending doom.

  Sybil opened the door before he got there and was standing just inside. She was wearing a pale pink dress with blue and green geometric shapes all over it, which left her arms and shoulders bare.

  ‘It’s very hot up here,’ he said when he was in the even more stifling atmosphere of the living room. ‘Don’t you want to open the windows?’

  ‘I never open windows,’ she said. ‘It lets insects in.’

  By now, he was bathed in sweat. ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ she said.

  Ridiculous, he thought. I am her guest. He unfolded the sheet of paper on which he had typed the contract and laid it on the round table. She remained standing. ‘I have the rent contract. Would you like to read it?’

  She didn’t sit down, but just glanced at the contract. ‘I don’t need to read it. I told you I’m living here. Dermot said I should.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps. But you still have to pay me rent.’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘I don’t pay rent. Why should I? I already said I’m living here.’

  The perspiration was dripping down his face like tears. ‘I don’t think you understand. If you have rooms in someone else’s property, you have to pay for it. You have to pay by the week or month. That’s what this paper is about. I’ll call Nicola in to witness it, if you know what that means, and then you sign and I sign and she sees us do that and she signs. OK?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not OK. I haven’t got the money. I work in Lidl on the checkout.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, but that means you’ll have to go. You can’t stay here without paying rent.’

  That awful shaking of the head began again. ‘I’m staying here like Dermot did. He never paid rent, not a penny, and I’m not either. This is my home now.’

  ‘No, it’s not, Sybil. If you don’t go, I shall have to fetch the police to put you out.’

  She took a step towards him and a cunning look spread across her face. There was deceit in it, and a half-smile. ‘I saw you hit Dermot with that bag you carry,’ she said. ‘It must have had something heavy in it. I was in my bedroom and I saw you from the window. He just lay there. I went to bed. He was still there in the morning. I went out there at five and saw him. You killed him like a killer on TV.’

  Carl stared at her.

  ‘I’ll tell the police if you make me leave. I didn’t go to them before as I’ve always wanted somewhere to live that’s not with my parents, but couldn’t afford it. Now I have this place, and I don’t have to pay any rent at all.’

  An analogy people made when something bad had happened was to say it was a nightmare. Carl was somewhere worse than a nightmare, a conjuring of horror only bearable if he knew he would wake up. He lacked the strength to speak and she saw this. She was watching him closely, not quite with a smile but with a calm, satisfied look.

  ‘I’ll keep it nice,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay for the electric and the gas, no need to worry about that. And I’ll do the garden for free, it won’t cost you.’

  Still Carl couldn’t speak. He got up and walked out, stumbling a little. Nicola was downstairs, doing something in the kitchen, preparing a meal perhaps. The flowers she had bought were in a vase on the windowsill, pink and mauve stiff-petalled daisies. In films when someone was in a rage or despair or the kind of situation Carl was in now, he – it was always a man – would pick up the vase of flowers and smash it against the wall. Carl stared at the vase, then lay down on the floor and buried his face in his hands. Nicola came in with the strawberries in a bowl and a jug of cream.

  ‘Oh, Carl, sweetheart, what’s wrong?’

  He lifted his head, then struggled to his feet. He couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t tell her he was a murderer. He couldn’t tell her anything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  IT WAS STILL warm outside when Lizzie left the clinic, and people were sitting at the tables outside the café, Gervaise among them. She sat down next to him.

  ‘What would you like? Coffee? Tea?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you think they have – well, alcohol?’

  ‘In this country,’ he said, ‘I doubt if there’s anywhere they don’t.’

  They did. She asked for white wine, not particular about what sort. His having a cup of tea seemed to her a reproach. She would have much preferred him to have wine too.

  ‘You wanted to ask my advice,’ he said. ‘What about?’

  ‘Well, it happened a week ago but I haven’t said a word to anyone. I nearly told my parents and then I thought they’d tell the police and the police would ask me questions – the sort of questions I shouldn’t want to answer.’

  ‘What would those sort of questions be, then?’

  ‘Oh, well, never mind. Nothing important. Shall I tell you what happened?’

  ‘That’s the point of all this, isn’t it?’

  She began to tell him the story, starting with her meeting the so-called Swithin Campbell and his arrangement to call for her while she was staying in Pinetree Court. She told him she was sure Swithin had thought she was rich, and had put Scotty and Redhead up to abducting her.

  ‘Didn’t your mother tell you that a man called her to demand a ransom for her daughter?’ she asked.

  ‘Should she have told me?’ He looked almost amused.

  ‘I thought she might, but they got it wrong. We are both called Elizabeth, you see, and they thought I was the rich one. They took me to various places, handcuffed me and put a gag on my mouth. I don’t know where I was, it was nowhere I knew. They fed me on bread and water like in a prison, they moved me about and took me down to south London. It was while I was there that a beautiful enormous pigeon flew into the window and smashed a pane, and the horrible men who were holding me ran away and left me. I suppose they believed it was the police breaking in. I got out and got a taxi back to my parents. There, now you know.’

  Lizzie took a large and satisfying draught of her wine. The girl who had served them had brought two chocolates on a glass dish to go with their drinks, and she took one. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘I remember when we were children and your parents lived near Stacey’s parents in Willesden. Do you remember that?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I do, but what’s it got to do with anything?’

  ‘You used to come round to Stacey’s to play, and you used to tell the most enormous whoppers. That’s the name they gave to lies in those days. Do you remember that too?’

  ‘I don’t kn
ow what you mean.’

  ‘Yes you do, Lizzie. I was visiting once and your dad came to fetch you, and I heard him ask Stacey’s mother, like it was a sort of joke, if you’d, I quote, been up to your usual tricks of telling porkies. There are a lot of words in the English language for telling lies.’

  ‘I wasn’t telling lies. Not now. It’s all true,’ said Lizzie, remembering how afraid she’d been.

  ‘Anyone who didn’t know you,’ said Gervaise, ‘might believe that tale, especially if you left out the bit about the miraculous bird.’ He paused, and smiled at her. ‘Just a piece of advice. After all, that’s what you asked for. Next time you tell that story, leave out the bird.’ He went inside to pay the bill.

  Lizzie got up and walked in the other direction, up to Maida Vale. She’d never liked that family; it wasn’t just Yvonne Weatherspoon, they were all the same. To be honest with herself, she had only asked Mr Clever Gervaise for advice because she fancied him.

  Well, that was the end of that. If nobody would believe her, she might as well put the whole experience out of her head. It had all been a mistake, not meant for her. She had thought she might warn the other Elizabeth about those two men, but now she didn’t care. Elizabeth Weatherspoon would just have to look out for herself.

  Meanwhile she, Lizzie, had a date that evening with a really nice man who’d asked her out when he brought his Basenji into the clinic. Only for a drink, but perhaps it would lead to greater things. While she waited for the number 98 bus, she thought about which of Stacey’s clothes she should wear for the evening.

  Tom was also on a bus – the number 18 – and also giving some thought to a serious subject. The evening before, he and Dot had been to a birthday party, his sister Wendy’s, and there Wendy’s next-door neighbour had listened with interest to his account of his bus rides and asked him why he didn’t write a book about them. If Tom had only known, Trevor Vincent made that enquiry of everyone who talked to him at any length about any hobby or pursuit. He did so not because he cared or knew anything about the particular topic, but because he had no other conversation.